Background Information leading up to Plessy v. Ferguson:
The Civil War ended in 1865, and the Reconstruction period began and then ended with the Compromise of 1877 . The compromise essentially stated that Southern Democrats would acknowledge Hayes as President, but only if the Republicans acceded to various demands:
1.The removal of all Federal troops from the former Confederate States. (Troops only remained in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, but the Compromise finalized the process.)
2.The appointment of at least one Southern Democrat to Hayes' cabinet. (David M. Key of Tennessee was Postmaster General). Hayes had already promised this.
3.The construction of another transcontinental railroad using the Texas and Pacific in the South (this had been part of the "Scott Plan," proposed by Thomas A. Scott, which initiated the process that led to the final compromise);
4.Legislation to help industrialize the South.
With this, southern state governments began passing Jim Crow laws that prohibited blacks from using the same public accommodations as whites. The Thirteenth Amendment served to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime. According to the Slaughterhouse Cases , the Thirteenth Amendment was intended primarily to abolish slavery as it had been previously known in the United States at the time, and that it equally forbade involuntary servitude. It was intimated, however, in that case that the Amendment was regarded at the time as insufficient to protect former slaves from certain laws which had been enacted in the Southern States, imposing upon them onerous disabilities and burdens and curtailing their rights in the pursuit of life, liberty and property to such an extent that their freedom was of little value. The Fourteenth Amendment was devised to meet this exigency.
The Supreme Court had ruled, in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to the actions of government, not to those of private individuals, and consequently did not protect persons against individuals or private entities who violated their civil rights. In particular, the Court invalidated most of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a law passed by the United States Congress to protect blacks from private acts of discrimination.
Interestingly, the one justice on the Supreme Court to vote against the majority in favor of Homer Plessy was Justice John M. Harlan, who was born and raised in Kentucky. This was apparently not that unusual because Harlan was known as the "great dissenter" during his 34 year stint on the Supreme Court.
Associate Justice Henry B. Brown is the man credited for writing the decision down in words that decided the case. He was born in Massachusetts and apparently the phrase "separate but equal" does not appear in the document.
Talk about role reversal!
One justice, David Brewer, didn't vote on the matter.
After the ruling, Justice Harlan is quoted as having said, "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law...In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case...The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficient purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution."
Sarah Roberts Vs Boston establishes precedent for “separate but equal”
In 1848, the city required Sarah Roberts, a five-year-old African American, to enroll in an all-black public elementary school. Benjamin Roberts, Sarah’s father and one of the nation’s first African American printers, challenged the Boston School Committee’s policy of racial segregation.
In 1850, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, one of the most influential state supreme courts in the country, held that racial segregation of public schools was permitted under the United States Constitution. In doing so, the court established a precedent that state supreme courts in the South quickly adopted. In 1896, the United States Supreme Court cited the Roberts case as precedent to uphold the constitutionality of racial segregation and the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson.
Sarah and Benjamin Roberts lost their legal challenge in the Massachusetts courts. However, their efforts anticipated the successful struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the famous case of Brown v. Board of Educationof Topeka (1954)—more than a century later.
In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed Act 111 (Separate Car Act) that required separate accommodations for African Americans and Whites on railroads, including separate railway cars, though it specified that the accommodations must be kept "equal". Concerned, several African Americans (including Louisiana's former governor P.B.S. Pinchback) and Whites in New Orleans formed an association, the Citizens' Committee to Test the Separate Car Act, dedicated to the repeal of that law. They raised money which they offered to the then-famous author and Radical Republican jurist, Albion W. Tourgée, to serve as lead counsel for their test case. Tourgée agreed to do it for free. Later, they enlisted Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black (an octoroon in the now-antiquated parlance), to take part in an act of planned civil disobedience. The plan was for Plessy to be thrown off the railway car and arrested[2] not for vagrancy, which would not have led to a challenge that could reach the Supreme Court, but for violating the Separate Car Act, which could and did lead to a challenge with the high court.
The Committee hired a detective to ensure that Plessy was arrested for violating the Separate Car Act , which the Citizen's Committee wanted to challenge with the goal of having it overturned. They chose Plessy because, with his light skin color, he could buy a first class train ticket and, at the same time, be arrested when he announced, while sitting on board the train, that he had an African-American ancestor. For the Committee, this was a deliberate attempt to exploit the lack of clear racial definition in either science or law so as to argue that segregation by race was an "unreasonable" use of state power.
On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a car of the East Louisiana Railroad that was designated for use by white patrons only. Although Plessy was born a free person and was one-eighth black and seven-eighths white, under a Louisiana law enacted in 1890, he was classified as Black, and thus required to sit in the "colored" car. When, in an act of planned disobedience, Plessy refused to leave the white car and move to the colored car, he was arrested and jailed.
Jim Crow legislation related to voting would quietly disenfranchise the Southern African American by requiring of prospective voters proof of land ownership or literacy tests at poll stations. Most African Americans were for the most part uneducated former slaves often leasing land from their formers owners and immediately lost their constitutionally guaranteed right to participate in the political system. Black community leaders who had achieved brief political success during the Reconstruction era lost any gains made when their voters disappeared. Historian Rogers Smith noted on the subject “lawmakers frequently admitted, indeed boasted, that such measures as complex registration rules, literacy and property tests, poll taxes, white primaries, and grandfather clauses were designed to produce an electorate confined to a white race that declared itself supreme”, notably rejecting the 14th and 15th Amendments to the American Constitution (1). The “separate but equal” doctrine would characterize American society until the doctrine was ultimately overturned during the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. William Rehnquist wrote a memo called "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" when he was a law clerk in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In his memo, Rehnquist argued that "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." He continued, "To the argument… that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are."(2)(3)
McWilliams, Wilson Carey. 1999. "ON ROGERS SMITH'S 'CIVIC IDEALS'." Studies in American Political Development 13, no. 1: 216-229. America: History & Life, EBSCOhost (accessed February 1, 2010).
In 1954 a landmark decision was made that declared state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students. The decision overturned earlier rulings going back to Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. On May 17th of the same year, the Warrens Court's unanimous (9-0) decision stated that "seperate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This decision ultimately paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement.
In 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their twenty children. The case was headed with the name of Mr. Oliver Brown, his name was used as a legal strategy. A stragedy to have a man at the head of the roster. Also, it was felt by lawyers with the National Chapter of the NAACP, that having Mr. Brown at the head of the roster would be better received by the U.S. Supreme Court Justices because Mr. Brown had an intact, complete family, as opposed to someone who was a single parent head of household.
The suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. Separate elementary schools were operated by the Topeka Board of Education under an 1879 Kansas law, which permitted (but did not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities for black and white students in twelve communities with populations over 15,000.
The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson , which had upheld a state law requiring "separate but equal" segregated facilities for blacks and whites in railway cars. The three-judge District Court panel found that segregation in public education has a detrimental effect upon negro children, but denied relief on the ground that the negro and white schools in Topeka were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricular, and educational qualifications of teachers.
-- Interesting Fact about Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka
The Supreme Court combined five cases under the heading of Brown v. Board of Education, because each sought the same legal remedy.
- Delaware: Belton vs. Gebhart
- Kansas: Brown vs. The Board of Education
- South Carolina: Briggs vs. Elliot
- Virgina: Davis vs. County Board of Prince Edward County
- Washington, D.C.: Bolling vs. C. Melvin Sharpe
A Video Featuring Linda Brown, Oliver Brown's daughter discussing his actions after she was denied being admitted into a public school. (caseyysmith12)
The law is absolutely worthless if there is no one in place to enforce it.
Enforcing the Integration of Public Schools: The Little Rock Nine
These students were aware of what the public thought of their entering into a "white" high school. They didn't worry about fitting in. Most whites, including the governor at the time, Orval Faubus, stood against them. Most troubling to the students was the fact that many blacks thought that the integration of Central would cause more trouble for their race than good.
The night before Thelma Mothershed, Elizabeth Eckford, Melba Pattillo, Jefferson Thomas, Ernest Green, Minniejean Brown, Carlotta Walls, Terrence Roberts and Gloria Ray, or the "Little Rock Nine" as history remembers them, were to enter into high school was not a peaceful night of sleep. It was a night filled with hate. Faubus declared that integration was an impossibility in a televised statement and instructed the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High and keep all blacks out of the school. They did keep them out for that first day of class.
Daisy Bates instructed the students to wait for her on Wednesday, the second day of school, and planned for all nine students and herself to enter the school together. Unfortunately, Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine, did not have a phone. She never received the message and attempted to enter the school alone through the front entrance. An angry mob met her, threatening to lynch her, as the Arkansas National Guard looked on. Fortunately, two whites stepped forward to aid her and she escaped without injury. The other eight were also denied admittance by the National Guard who were under orders from Governor Faubus.
Soon after this, On September 20, Judge Ronald N. Davies granted NAACP lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Wiley Branton an injunction that prevented Governor Faubus from using the National Guard to deny the nine black students admittance to Central High. Faubus announced that he would comply with the court order but suggested that the nine stay away for their own safety. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the nine students. Each student had their own guard. The students did enter Central High and were protected somewhat, but they were the subject of persecution. Students spat at them, beat them, and yelled insults. White mothers pulled their children out of school, and even blacks told the nine to give up.
Faubus was set on preventing his schools from integration. The Little Rock School Board was granted an injunction delaying integration until 1961. However, the ruling was overturned by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and integration was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1958. Faubus ignored the ruling and used his power to shut down Little Rock's public schools. During the shutdown, white students attended private schools in the area but black students had no choice but to wait.
These 9 students, although they didn't realize it then, made huge waves in the civil rights movement. Not only did they show that blacks COULD fight for their rights and WIN, they also brought the idea of segregation to the forefront of people's minds. They showed the nation what extreme and horrible measures some whites would take to protect segregation. No doubt, the events at Central High inspired many lunch counter sit ins and Freedom Rides and inspired blacks to take up the cause of Civil Rights. If these nine children could take on the huge task, they could too.
In 1954, the Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. "Racially segregated schools," the Court concluded, are "inherently unequal." The Court found support for its decision in studies that indicated that minority students learn better in racially mixed classrooms. The next year, in Brown II, the Court announced a decision outlining its plan for implementing racial desegregation in the schools. The Court took a cautious approach, remanding the cases to district courts with orders to integrate the schools "with all deliberate speed."
As it turned out, there was a lot more deliberation than speed, and a decade after the Brown decision, only a small percentage of black children in the Deep South attended schools with white children. Opposition to Brown was intense in some places. Governors stood in schoolhouse doors and angry whites terrorized blacks. In some places, such as at Little Rock's Central High, integration was only achieved after a powerful show of force by federal troops.
In one of the school districts involved in the 1954 school desegregation cases, Prince Edward, Virginia, county officials decided to close public schools altogether rather than integrate. Tuition benefits were provided to children to attend private schools, but the only private schools operating in the county had white-only admission policies. In 1964, an impatient Supreme Court found Prince Edward's closing of the public schools to violate equal protection, and indicated that federal courts were empowered to order the opening of schools and to order the raising of taxes to pay for them, if necessary. "The time for mere deliberate speed has run out," the Court said.
Source: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/conlaw/sepbutequal.htm
Reflections By People Who Were Directly Involved in School Segregation
Brown v. Board: W&M law professors share personal stories
by David Williard | June 3, 2009
Linda Malone’s parents used the “N” word. Larry Palmer’s “brilliant” elementary-school teacher had no career choices other than to teach. Davison Douglas’ world was white—with three exceptions. Paul Marcus watched his Los Angeles school district segregate more than a decade after Brown v Board of Education.
Malone, Palmer, Douglas and Marcus, each a professor of law at the College of William & Mary, shared those experiences during a law-school forum based on the book “The Law Touched Our Hearts,” to which each had contributed.
Mildred Wigfall Robinson, the Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and co-editor of the book, moderated discussion during the forum. The title of the book, she explained, referenced a conversation between Chief Justice EarlWarren and President Dwight D. Eisenhower during the time the case was being considered.Eisenhower was doubtful that a Court order could “change the hearts of men” regarding segregation.
Malone, the Marshall-Wythe Foundation Professor of Law, described how hard it was to overcome a racist mentality as a child growing up in Chattanooga, Tenn. Finally she read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. “I was Huck Finn.” She said. “I had been raised in a very racist way. I couldn’t understand why I started feeling different … I just realized that it was wrong.”
Palmer, professor of law and research, discussed Fulbright scholar Dr. Hyram, the St. Louis public-school teacher who helped instill a sense of overcoming adversity in his students. “What I really feel in reflecting on this is a sort of survivor’s guilt,” Palmer said. “I got all of that because Dr. Hyram didn’t have any other opportunities.”
Douglas, Arther B. Hanson Professor of Law and recently named dean of the law school, said, “My world was white. My church was white. My school was white. My neighborhood was white. My Boy Scout troop was white. … Until the fall of 1969.” In 1969, Charlotte, N.C. began a massive busing program in order to integrate its school system. Douglas’ became friends with one of the new students who joined the debate team. “I got a different kind of education in terms of understanding what it was like to be in someone else’s very different experience,” he said.
Marcus, Haynes Professor of Law, detailed how his Los Angeles high school, which had been integrated, segregated following threats of lawsuits seeking redistricting. Subsequently there was a rise in the number of high-priced private schools catering to parents who were fearful that redistricting would negatively impact their children. The result is that high-school students in the city have a very different educational experience today, Marcus said. Source: http://www.wm.edu/news/features/diversity/brow-v.-board-wm-law-professors-share-personal-stories.php
There is hope for change...posted by kathomp07 TIMELINE OF EVENTS OF THE JIM CROW ERA
On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren read the decision of the unanimous Court:
"We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does...We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment"
This picture is frightening... to say the least. It's a protest happening after University of Alabama enrolled its first black woman. Found linked to the site made by the Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-aftermath.html. Essentially a detailed description of an exhibition being put on by the library, but online you information and more pictures. This one really scared me, though, so I thought it was a good jumping off point.
I decided to find political cartoons that related to “separate but equal” In these cartoons it’s suggested that the Supreme Court’s decision was really rash and rushed and that it interrupted the delicate balance of race relations in the United States. Most whites believed that the US was making steady progress toward “equality”. The “bomb” dropped by Supreme Court is the reason that things got so out of hand; it was forced and unorganized. I believe however, that they made the right decision. Jumping into the cold water is a lot quicker and easier than slowly stepping in. By simply diving into an integrated society it made the idea easier to accept in the long run.
Gay Is The New Black
I see a more and more similarities every time I compare Prop8 to Plessy v. Ferguson. I think in the future we will look back on our society's thoughts on same sex marriage with the same disappointment we have now when we look at our countries racial laws. This is an article I found in the Delaware Libertarian comparing the two civil rights movements. http://delawarelibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/05/because-after-all-plessy-v-ferguson-was.html
You'd have to wonder from what remote era of America's Plessy v Ferguson years this issued:
I don’t actually see why communities shouldn’t prohibit inter-racial marriage if they want to. I’d prefer not to live in such a community — given my domestic circumstances, in fact, I wouldn’t be able to! — but this doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable or immoral restriction for a state or country to impose on its citizens. But perhaps that’s just me. I simply don’t “get” the hysterical race panic that’s consumed so much rational thought in the modern West.
You'd have to wonder, except that it was published two days ago at Secular Right in support of what appears to be a new attempt to craft an argument against gay marriage [h/t Waldo for the link]. The author is John Derbyshire, frequent National Review contributor.
So now the best argument against gay marriage is not that it will destroy heterosexual marriage [opposite marriage for beauty pageant contestants], but that we never should have forced people to let white people marry negroes.
Here's the point for those that don't get it: Thomas Jefferson once, famously, wrote, The Earth belongs to the living.
Gay marriage is here, and here to stay, because the upcoming generation simply doesn't care about arguments to the contrary, and are not going to spend time or political capital on trying to keep Ellen Degeneres or George Takei from finding happiness--nor do they see that institution as the end of civilization as we know it.
So while Derbyshire's comparison to interracial marriage (which he makes the paragraph after saying there is no legitimate comparison between gay and interracial marriage) is revealing regarding the intellectual poverty of social conservative thought in the 21st Century, it is destined to become (at best) a footnote relic in the history of Statist racism.
Background Information leading up to Plessy v. Ferguson:
The Civil War ended in 1865, and the Reconstruction period began and then ended with the Compromise of 1877 . The compromise essentially stated that Southern Democrats would acknowledge Hayes as President, but only if the Republicans acceded to various demands:
1.The removal of all Federal troops from the former Confederate States. (Troops only remained in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, but the Compromise finalized the process.)
2.The appointment of at least one Southern Democrat to Hayes' cabinet. (David M. Key of Tennessee was Postmaster General). Hayes had already promised this.
3.The construction of another transcontinental railroad using the Texas and Pacific in the South (this had been part of the "Scott Plan," proposed by Thomas A. Scott, which initiated the process that led to the final compromise);
4.Legislation to help industrialize the South.
With this, southern state governments began passing Jim Crow laws that prohibited blacks from using the same public accommodations as whites. The Thirteenth Amendment served to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime. According to the Slaughterhouse Cases , the Thirteenth Amendment was intended primarily to abolish slavery as it had been previously known in the United States at the time, and that it equally forbade involuntary servitude. It was intimated, however, in that case that the Amendment was regarded at the time as insufficient to protect former slaves from certain laws which had been enacted in the Southern States, imposing upon them onerous disabilities and burdens and curtailing their rights in the pursuit of life, liberty and property to such an extent that their freedom was of little value. The Fourteenth Amendment was devised to meet this exigency.
The Supreme Court had ruled, in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to the actions of government, not to those of private individuals, and consequently did not protect persons against individuals or private entities who violated their civil rights. In particular, the Court invalidated most of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a law passed by the United States Congress to protect blacks from private acts of discrimination.
Interestingly, the one justice on the Supreme Court to vote against the majority in favor of Homer Plessy was Justice John M. Harlan, who was born and raised in Kentucky. This was apparently not that unusual because Harlan was known as the "great dissenter" during his 34 year stint on the Supreme Court.
Associate Justice Henry B. Brown is the man credited for writing the decision down in words that decided the case. He was born in Massachusetts and apparently the phrase "separate but equal" does not appear in the document.
Talk about role reversal!
One justice, David Brewer, didn't vote on the matter.
http://www.oyez.org/justices/henry_b_brown
http://www.oyez.org/cases/1851-1900/1895/1895_210/
http://www.oyez.org/justices/john_m_harlan
After the ruling, Justice Harlan is quoted as having said, "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law...In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case...The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficient purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution."
http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/post-civilwar/plessy.html
Sarah Roberts Vs Boston establishes precedent for “separate but equal”
In 1848, the city required Sarah Roberts, a five-year-old African American, to enroll in an all-black public elementary school. Benjamin Roberts, Sarah’s father and one of the nation’s first African American printers, challenged the Boston School Committee’s policy of racial segregation.
In 1850, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, one of the most influential state supreme courts in the country, held that racial segregation of public schools was permitted under the United States Constitution. In doing so, the court established a precedent that state supreme courts in the South quickly adopted. In 1896, the United States Supreme Court cited the Roberts case as precedent to uphold the constitutionality of racial segregation and the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson.
Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson
http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/acs/1890s/plessy/plessy.html
Sarah and Benjamin Roberts lost their legal challenge in the Massachusetts courts. However, their efforts anticipated the successful struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the famous case of Brown v. Board of Educationof Topeka (1954)—more than a century later.
http://www.masshist.org/longroad/02education/roberts.htm
In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed Act 111 (Separate Car Act) that required separate accommodations for African Americans and Whites on railroads, including separate railway cars, though it specified that the accommodations must be kept "equal". Concerned, several African Americans (including Louisiana's former governor P.B.S. Pinchback) and Whites in New Orleans formed an association, the Citizens' Committee to Test the Separate Car Act, dedicated to the repeal of that law. They raised money which they offered to the then-famous author and Radical Republican jurist, Albion W. Tourgée, to serve as lead counsel for their test case. Tourgée agreed to do it for free. Later, they enlisted Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black (an octoroon in the now-antiquated parlance), to take part in an act of planned civil disobedience. The plan was for Plessy to be thrown off the railway car and arrested[2] not for vagrancy, which would not have led to a challenge that could reach the Supreme Court, but for violating the Separate Car Act, which could and did lead to a challenge with the high court.
The Committee hired a detective to ensure that Plessy was arrested for violating the Separate Car Act , which the Citizen's Committee wanted to challenge with the goal of having it overturned. They chose Plessy because, with his light skin color, he could buy a first class train ticket and, at the same time, be arrested when he announced, while sitting on board the train, that he had an African-American ancestor. For the Committee, this was a deliberate attempt to exploit the lack of clear racial definition in either science or law so as to argue that segregation by race was an "unreasonable" use of state power.
On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a car of the East Louisiana Railroad that was designated for use by white patrons only. Although Plessy was born a free person and was one-eighth black and seven-eighths white, under a Louisiana law enacted in 1890, he was classified as Black, and thus required to sit in the "colored" car. When, in an act of planned disobedience, Plessy refused to leave the white car and move to the colored car, he was arrested and jailed.
Jim Crow legislation related to voting would quietly disenfranchise the Southern African American by requiring of prospective voters proof of land ownership or literacy tests at poll stations. Most African Americans were for the most part uneducated former slaves often leasing land from their formers owners and immediately lost their constitutionally guaranteed right to participate in the political system. Black community leaders who had achieved brief political success during the Reconstruction era lost any gains made when their voters disappeared. Historian Rogers Smith noted on the subject “lawmakers frequently admitted, indeed boasted, that such measures as complex registration rules, literacy and property tests, poll taxes, white primaries, and grandfather clauses were designed to produce an electorate confined to a white race that declared itself supreme”, notably rejecting the 14th and 15th Amendments to the American Constitution (1). The “separate but equal” doctrine would characterize American society until the doctrine was ultimately overturned during the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
William Rehnquist wrote a memo called "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" when he was a law clerk in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In his memo, Rehnquist argued that "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." He continued, "To the argument… that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are."(2)(3)
Rev. Oliver Brown; Lead Plaintiff
Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka
In 1954 a landmark decision was made that declared state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students. The decision overturned earlier rulings going back to Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. On May 17th of the same year, the Warrens Court's unanimous (9-0) decision stated that "seperate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This decision ultimately paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement.
In 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their twenty children. The case was headed with the name of Mr. Oliver Brown, his name was used as a legal strategy. A stragedy to have a man at the head of the roster. Also, it was felt by lawyers with the National Chapter of the NAACP, that having Mr. Brown at the head of the roster would be better received by the U.S. Supreme Court Justices because Mr. Brown had an intact, complete family, as opposed to someone who was a single parent head of household.
The suit called for the school district to reverse its policy of racial segregation. Separate elementary schools were operated by the Topeka Board of Education under an 1879 Kansas law, which permitted (but did not require) districts to maintain separate elementary school facilities for black and white students in twelve communities with populations over 15,000.
The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson , which had upheld a state law requiring "separate but equal" segregated facilities for blacks and whites in railway cars. The three-judge District Court panel found that segregation in public education has a detrimental effect upon negro children, but denied relief on the ground that the negro and white schools in Topeka were substantially equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curricular, and educational qualifications of teachers.
-- Interesting Fact about Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka
The Supreme Court combined five cases under the heading of Brown v. Board of Education, because each sought the same legal remedy.
- Delaware: Belton vs. Gebhart
- Kansas: Brown vs. The Board of Education
- South Carolina: Briggs vs. Elliot
- Virgina: Davis vs. County Board of Prince Edward County
- Washington, D.C.: Bolling vs. C. Melvin Sharpe
Sources:
http://brownvboard.org/summary/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
A Video Featuring Linda Brown, Oliver Brown's daughter discussing his actions after she was denied being admitted into a public school. (caseyysmith12)
The law is absolutely worthless if there is no one in place to enforce it.
These students were aware of what the public thought of their entering into a "white" high school. They didn't worry about fitting in. Most whites, including the governor at the time, Orval Faubus, stood against them. Most troubling to the students was the fact that many blacks thought that the integration of Central would cause more trouble for their race than good.
The night before Thelma Mothershed, Elizabeth Eckford, Melba Pattillo, Jefferson Thomas, Ernest Green, Minniejean Brown, Carlotta Walls, Terrence Roberts and Gloria Ray, or the "Little Rock Nine" as history remembers them, were to enter into high school was not a peaceful night of sleep. It was a night filled with hate. Faubus declared that integration was an impossibility in a televised statement and instructed the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High and keep all blacks out of the school. They did keep them out for that first day of class.
Daisy Bates instructed the students to wait for her on Wednesday, the second day of school, and planned for all nine students and herself to enter the school together. Unfortunately, Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine, did not have a phone. She never received the message and attempted to enter the school alone through the front entrance. An angry mob met her, threatening to lynch her, as the Arkansas National Guard looked on. Fortunately, two whites stepped forward to aid her and she escaped without injury. The other eight were also denied admittance by the National Guard who were under orders from Governor Faubus.
Soon after this, On September 20, Judge Ronald N. Davies granted NAACP lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Wiley Branton an injunction that prevented Governor Faubus from using the National Guard to deny the nine black students admittance to Central High. Faubus announced that he would comply with the court order but suggested that the nine stay away for their own safety. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the nine students. Each student had their own guard. The students did enter Central High and were protected somewhat, but they were the subject of persecution. Students spat at them, beat them, and yelled insults. White mothers pulled their children out of school, and even blacks told the nine to give up.
Faubus was set on preventing his schools from integration. The Little Rock School Board was granted an injunction delaying integration until 1961. However, the ruling was overturned by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and integration was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1958. Faubus ignored the ruling and used his power to shut down Little Rock's public schools. During the shutdown, white students attended private schools in the area but black students had no choice but to wait.
These 9 students, although they didn't realize it then, made huge waves in the civil rights movement. Not only did they show that blacks COULD fight for their rights and WIN, they also brought the idea of segregation to the forefront of people's minds. They showed the nation what extreme and horrible measures some whites would take to protect segregation. No doubt, the events at Central High inspired many lunch counter sit ins and Freedom Rides and inspired blacks to take up the cause of Civil Rights. If these nine children could take on the huge task, they could too.
Source: The Little Rock Nine
In 1954, the Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. "Racially segregated schools," the Court concluded, are "inherently unequal." The Court found support
for its decision in studies that indicated that minority students learn better in racially mixed classrooms. The next year, in Brown II, the Court announced a decision outlining its plan for implementing racial desegregation in the schools. The Court took a cautious approach, remanding the cases to district courts with orders to integrate the schools "with all deliberate speed."
As it turned out, there was a lot more deliberation than speed, and a decade after the Brown decision, only a small percentage of black children in the Deep South attended schools with white children. Opposition to Brown was intense in some places. Governors stood in schoolhouse doors and angry whites terrorized blacks. In some places, such as at Little Rock's Central High, integration was only achieved after a powerful show of force by federal troops.
In one of the school districts involved in the 1954 school desegregation cases, Prince Edward, Virginia, county officials decided to close public schools altogether rather than integrate. Tuition benefits were provided to children to attend private schools, but the only private schools operating in the county had white-only admission policies. In 1964, an impatient Supreme Court found Prince Edward's closing of the public schools to violate equal protection, and indicated that federal courts were empowered to order the opening of schools and to order the raising of taxes to pay for them, if necessary. "The time for mere deliberate speed has run out," the Court said.
Source: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/conlaw/sepbutequal.htm
Reflections By People Who Were Directly Involved in School Segregation
Brown v. Board: W&M law professors share personal stories
by David Williard | June 3, 2009Linda Malone’s parents used the “N” word. Larry Palmer’s “brilliant” elementary-school teacher had no career choices other than to teach. Davison Douglas’ world was white—with three exceptions. Paul Marcus watched his Los Angeles school district segregate more than a decade after Brown v Board of Education.
Malone, Palmer, Douglas and Marcus, each a professor of law at the College of William & Mary, shared those experiences during a law-school forum based on the book “The Law Touched Our Hearts,” to which each had contributed.
Mildred Wigfall Robinson, the Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and co-editor of the book, moderated discussion during the forum. The title of the book, she explained, referenced a conversation between Chief Justice Earl Warren and President Dwight D. Eisenhower during the time the case was being considered. Eisenhower was doubtful that a Court order could “change the hearts of men” regarding segregation.
Malone, the Marshall-Wythe Foundation Professor of Law, described how hard it was to overcome a racist mentality as a child growing up in Chattanooga, Tenn. Finally she read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. “I was Huck Finn.” She said. “I had been raised in a very racist way. I couldn’t understand why I started feeling different … I just realized that it was wrong.”
Palmer, professor of law and research, discussed Fulbright scholar Dr. Hyram, the St. Louis public-school teacher who helped instill a sense of overcoming adversity in his students. “What I really feel in reflecting on this is a sort of survivor’s guilt,” Palmer said. “I got all of that because Dr. Hyram didn’t have any other opportunities.”
Douglas, Arther B. Hanson Professor of Law and recently named dean of the law school, said, “My world was white. My church was white. My school was white. My neighborhood was white. My Boy Scout troop was white. … Until the fall of 1969.” In 1969, Charlotte, N.C. began a massive busing program in order to integrate its school system. Douglas’ became friends with one of the new students who joined the debate team. “I got a different kind of education in terms of understanding what it was like to be in someone else’s very different experience,” he said.
Marcus, Haynes Professor of Law, detailed how his Los Angeles high school, which had been integrated, segregated following threats of lawsuits seeking redistricting. Subsequently there was a rise in the number of high-priced private schools catering to parents who were fearful that redistricting would negatively impact their children. The result is that high-school students in the city have a very different educational experience today, Marcus said.
Source: http://www.wm.edu/news/features/diversity/brow-v.-board-wm-law-professors-share-personal-stories.php
There is hope for change...posted by kathomp07
TIMELINE OF EVENTS OF THE JIM CROW ERA
https:/.../aboutnea/ talldem.html?mode=
On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren read the decision of the unanimous Court:
"We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does...We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment"
http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/early-civilrights/brown.html
This picture is frightening... to say the least. It's a protest happening after University of Alabama enrolled its first black woman. Found linked to the site made by the Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-aftermath.html. Essentially a detailed description of an exhibition being put on by the library, but online you information and more pictures. This one really scared me, though, so I thought it was a good jumping off point.
I decided to find political cartoons that related to “separate but equal” In these cartoons it’s suggested that the Supreme Court’s decision was really rash and rushed and that it interrupted the delicate balance of race relations in the United States. Most whites believed that the US was making steady progress toward “equality”. The “bomb” dropped by Supreme Court is the reason that things got so out of hand; it was forced and unorganized. I believe however, that they made the right decision. Jumping into the cold water is a lot quicker and easier than slowly stepping in. By simply diving into an integrated society it made the idea easier to accept in the long run.
Gay Is The New Black
I see a more and more similarities every time I compare Prop8 to Plessy v. Ferguson. I think in the future we will look back on our society's thoughts on same sex marriage with the same disappointment we have now when we look at our countries racial laws. This is an article I found in the Delaware Libertarian comparing the two civil rights movements. http://delawarelibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/05/because-after-all-plessy-v-ferguson-was.html
Because, after all, Plessy v Ferguson was not such a bad idea
You'd have to wonder from what remote era of America's Plessy v Ferguson years this issued:I don’t actually see why communities shouldn’t prohibit inter-racial marriage if they want to. I’d prefer not to live in such a community — given my domestic circumstances, in fact, I wouldn’t be able to! — but this doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable or immoral restriction for a state or country to impose on its citizens. But perhaps that’s just me. I simply don’t “get” the hysterical race panic that’s consumed so much rational thought in the modern West.
You'd have to wonder, except that it was published two days ago at Secular Right in support of what appears to be a new attempt to craft an argument against gay marriage [h/t Waldo for the link]. The author is John Derbyshire, frequent National Review contributor.
So now the best argument against gay marriage is not that it will destroy heterosexual marriage [opposite marriage for beauty pageant contestants], but that we never should have forced people to let white people marry negroes.
Here's the point for those that don't get it: Thomas Jefferson once, famously, wrote, The Earth belongs to the living.
Gay marriage is here, and here to stay, because the upcoming generation simply doesn't care about arguments to the contrary, and are not going to spend time or political capital on trying to keep Ellen Degeneres or George Takei from finding happiness--nor do they see that institution as the end of civilization as we know it.
So while Derbyshire's comparison to interracial marriage (which he makes the paragraph after saying there is no legitimate comparison between gay and interracial marriage) is revealing regarding the intellectual poverty of social conservative thought in the 21st Century, it is destined to become (at best) a footnote relic in the history of Statist racism.